Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

158 reframing latin america
the historical mission of crusaders, explorers and conquistadors, has taken
to the road in search of his own cultural identity, national expression and
continental liberation (heir to Ulysses, Theseus, Prometheus, Dante, Quetzalcoatl).
This unended and perhaps endless journey through the labyrinth
has woven the myth of Latin America behind it, and, fi nally, contradictorily,
integrated it into the Western culture from which it continues to
feel itself alienated. A succession of mainly masculine writers, seeking to
impose themselves on the colonized territory of Latin American culture,
have found themselves, rather like the Irishman James Joyce, having to retreat
to higher ground and to enlist unexpected allies, including natives and
women. This is why in Latin American fi ction the story is so often inverted
and heroic biographies are so frequently underpinned by a mythical origin
in virgin, Indian America, and a utopian objective in “La Madre Revolución”
and “La Patria Grande.” [. . .]
History: The Quest for Identity and the Field of Forking Paths
Given the imposed dualism of Latin America’s Mestizo culture, the concept
of choices, crossroads, forking paths or alternative destinies is inscribed in
the very origin of the new continent. Their persistence explains why it is
that the greatest Latin American novels are not just the vehicles of speculation,
experimentation or playfulness, but determined explorations of Latin
American reality [. . .].
Culture: The Magic Labyrinth
I fi nd myself in a confl ict, between the desire to return the confi dence
you have placed in me and the difficulty of satisfying it, given both the
lack of documents and books and my limited knowledge of a country
as immense, varied and unknown as this New World. [simón bolívar,
“the jamaica letter,” 1815]
It is unusual these days to pick one’s way through a literary supplement
without coming across some fi ctional or critical work based implicitly or
explicitly upon the concept of the labyrinth. Umberto Eco’s Il pendolo di
Foucault (1988) is only the best known recent example of a novel structured
around a paradigm which may, retrospectively, dominate our vision
of twentieth-century narrative. In no literature, however, are images of
labyrinths as persistent and pervasive as they have been in Latin American
literature, not just recently but since the 1920s, and an astonishing number